Free Newsgroup Servers Revealed
August 25, 2009 - NewsAdmin Staff Writer

Huey was a free Dachshund that I inherited from my friend Larry while we were in high school. Larry had accumulated an excessive number of pets... a lizard, snake, ferret, cape buffalo.... and he was told by his parents to find a new home for several of the animals. My brothers and I had wanted a dog, Larry had a free dog to offer, so it seemed like a perfect arrangement at the time, or so we thought. Within an hour of bringing Huey home, he had proceeded to relieve himself on the kitchen floor, the living room floor, and was in the process of using the family room sofa for target practice when our Dad quickly relocated him to the garage.

As my brothers and I attempted to justify Huey's actions to our parents... new environment, too much fiber, irritable bowel syndrome... the conversation was interrupted by primal growls emanating from the garage. Opening the door to take a peek inside, we saw a clump of moist leather that had once resembled our Dad's work shoes, and an incriminating shoelace dangling from Huey's frothing jowls. Larry was asked to reclaim his deranged dog shortly thereafter, and we learned two important lessons that day: 1) Never lock an angry Dachshund in a garage 2) Free stuff often comes with strings attached.

To some extent the latter lesson holds true when it comes to a public newsgroup server. They sound ideal... free newsgroups, free downloading, free posting... but more often than not, when you scratch past the surface those freebie arrangements aren't all they're cracked up to be. While current economic conditions are pressing folks to watch their spending, there are a few reasons why a paid membership with a commercial Usenet service may be money well spent.

Hey, Where Did Everyone Go?
It's not uncommon for users to switch from a commercial Usenet service to a free service, only to discover that there are fewer newsgroup posts, or their favorite groups have disappeared entirely. In order to understand this phenomena, it's important to have a basic understanding of how newsgroup content is distributed.

Posted content within the Usenet community is distributed between news servers through newsfeed exchanges, as opposed to news servers retrieving posts from a central collecting point. As an example Server A may exchange feeds with Servers B and C, but if Server D only exchanges a feed with Server C, they may not receive newsgroup content that was posted to Servers A and B. Simply put, the more newsfeed arrangements a news server establishes, the more content they'll acquire for their users on a daily basis.

For a variety of reasons commercial Usenet services are feeding each other with more frequency these days, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for free Usenet sites to establish and maintain an adequate number of feeds. With fewer feeds to rely on, these free alternatives will usually deliver fewer newsgroups, fewer posts, and fewer complete discussion threads than what you'd find on a commercial Usenet service.

Restrictions, Restrictions, Restrictions
In all fairness, many free Usenet sites are provided as a goodwill gesture to the online community. Since the operators of these free sites do not have the resources to run a full-scale Usenet site, they will usually limit their service features so that it doesn't become a burden (financial or otherwise) to operate their sites. As an example free sites may not offer a complete list of newsgroups (binary groups are almost always excluded), or they may restrict users from establishing fast connections, downloading too much data, or posting content. Depending upon your personal requirements, these type of limitations may make the newsgroups unusable for your purposes.

Who Said Less Is More?
The same issues that motivate free Usenet providers to restrict their service... costs & limited resources... are the same factors that prevent them from offering extra features. Commercial providers offer several methods of access (NNTP, Web, Cellular, etc.), newsgroup search engines, secure connections (SSL), and technical support that further improve the Usenet experience for people. These are not trivial bells and whistles, but important features determine if the newsgroups being accessible or inaccessible to many users.

Getting Back What You Put In
As larger ISPs have made questionable decisions to drop newsgroups, commercial providers will have to pickup the slack and continue to deliver a quality product in order to drive Usenet's future growth. As these providers invest in more servers, storage, bandwidth & development to help sustain the Usenet community, they'll need to offset some of those costs through paid memberships. If you enjoy the newsgroups as much as we do, spending a few dollars for a membership with a commercial provider will go along ways toward securing Usenet's future.

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